Lessons from the Holocaust: How to be good police officers

Nassau police officers learn tolerance

by Michael Orbach

Each of the police cadets, dressed in gray uniforms and wearing polished black shoes, held a passport. In turn, the tour guide asked them what the passport said.

Cadet Jennifer Oddo had a French man who hid Jews during WW2, he was killed in a concentration camp in 1944.

Cadet Keith Carlo got Rosalie Shachter, a Jewish woman from the Ukraine. She was gassed.

Cadet Casey Wall said the passport he held told the story of a homosexual actor who was born at the turn of the century. The actor and his Jewish lover were killed by the Germans.

Then the tour guide, Sarah Cushman, the assistant education director of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, asked the candidates if they knew what the Holocaust was.

Wall ventured Jews being killed and D-day.

Cushman corrected him gently, "They weren't all Jews," she said. Anyone who didn't fit into the master race ideology was killed by the Nazis, Cushman explained. People like the French man who helped shelter the unwanted were also persecuted.

"Under the Nazi regime, it became a crime to be compassionate," Cushman said.

The cadets were part of an innovative program run by the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County that teaches police cadets about tolerance through the Holocaust. The four-hour program is mandatory for all cadets in the Nassau police academy and the Suffolk County police force has recently made the program mandatory. the day's program begins with an overview about the Holocaust, followed by a tour of the museum and meetings with survivors. Afterwards, the students partake in a discussion run by a member of the Anti-Defamation League.

"Law Enforcement and Society: Lessons of the Holocaust," was created by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and by the Anti-Defamation League in 1999. Since its inception the program, which takes place in three centers in the U.S., has been given to over 50,000 law enforcement officers and FBI personnel.

Howard Maier, Chairman of the Board of the center, said that the point of the program is to deliver a "moral message."

"What started with name calling and stereotyping and the degrading of people ended with mass murder and through it all, law enforcement was partner to the crime," he explained. "After spending a day here the police recruits wil understand how dangerous it is to hold onto long held prejudices."

During a brief presentation, Maier spoke about Crystallnacht and how German police stood by as 101 synagogues were destroyed and thousands were sent to concentration camps including Maier's uncle and nine-year-old cousin.

"This is the most egregious example of law enforcement gone awry," Maier explained. "When hatred, intolerance and prejudice find its way into police."

Shevach Berkovitz, a police officer in the 4th District who grew up in Boro Park, underwent the program when he was a cadet. As the only Jew in his class, he says he was known as the "token chosen one." After the day at the Holocaust Center, he said, many of the cadets became interested in Jewish customs and the effect the Holocaust had on the Jewish community.

"A lot of them felt that one day here wasn't enough," Berkovitz explained.

He also said that the training has helped for police officers who may come into contact with survivors of the Holocaust.

"There are times elder residents who may have experienced the Holocaust, they see the uniform and not the badge," said Berkovitz.

The 4th District includes part of the Five Towns and Berkovitz added that being Jewish in the Five Towns hasn't hurt him any.

"It does make my job easier," he said. "We don't get called for bar-mitzvahs. We see people at their worst."

Sergeant Scott M. Bresalier of the Police Academy, a religious Conservative Jew, and national president of Shomrim, a fraternal organization of Jewish police officers,  praised the program.

"When you see pictures, it answers a lot of questions," he said.

At the session police recruits are given a copy of "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland," by Richard Browning, a non-fiction account of how a regular police battalion in Germany killed thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.

Beth Lilac, the Director of Education for the museum said that the book was chosen because the men eventually served willingly in the Einsatzgruppen, a paramilitary death squad.

"It proves that even the most intimate murderers had choices," she explained.

Browning, a historian of the Holocaust, said over email that he was "gratified that both the military and the police have found the book relevant to raising consciousness about issues of moral decision-making for men in uniform who may find themselves in situations not of their own choosing."

Though in light of the recent immigrant legislation in Arizona, the program raised questions for at least one of the officers.

Berkovitz said he was happy he "works in Nassau and not Arizona."

"If a law is enacted, we'd enforce it," he said. "It's a difficult thing.. If you always have to walk around with ID... Back in the day German Jews had to wear Yellow Stars. "